阅读说明：本技术 墙面背景设置方法、系统、电子设备及介质 (Wall surface background setting method and system, electronic device and medium ) 是由 陶静 于 2021-06-28 设计创作，主要内容包括：本发明公开了一种墙面背景设置方法、系统、电子设备及介质。墙面背景设置方法包括：从三维房屋模型中选取目标墙面；通过拍摄装置获取背景图像；从所述背景图像中提取特征信息；将所述特征信息映射至所述目标墙面。本发明通过将用户预先自主选取的特征信息映射至墙面上,在不需要重新涂刷墙面的基础上,通过三维模型重新设置墙面颜色等特征信息,能够让用户提前看到实物效果,避免因墙面颜色、墙面装饰品等特征信息上墙后因效果不满意而导致返工、浪费时间,大大减少了用户装修的成本,同时还避免了因重复施工对墙体造成的损伤。(The invention discloses a wall surface background setting method, a wall surface background setting system, electronic equipment and a wall surface background setting medium. The wall surface background setting method comprises the following steps: selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model; acquiring a background image through a shooting device; extracting feature information from the background image; and mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface. According to the invention, the characteristic information which is selected by the user in advance is mapped to the wall surface, and the characteristic information such as the wall surface color is reset through the three-dimensional model on the basis of not painting the wall surface again, so that the user can see the real object effect in advance, the reworking and time waste caused by unsatisfactory effect after the characteristic information such as the wall surface color and the wall surface decoration is painted on the wall surface are avoided, the decoration cost of the user is greatly reduced, and meanwhile, the damage to the wall body caused by repeated construction is also avoided.)

1. A wall background setting method is characterized by comprising the following steps:

selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model;

acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

extracting feature information from the background image;

and mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface.

2. The wall surface background setting method according to claim 1, wherein the acquiring of the background image by the photographing device includes:

directly acquiring the background image through shooting of the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored.

3. The wall surface background setting method according to claim 1, wherein the characteristic information includes color information and/or all or part of image information in the background image.

4. The wall surface background setting method according to claim 3, wherein when the characteristic information includes the whole or part of the image information, the whole or part of the image information is proportionally mapped to the target wall surface.

5. The wall surface background setting method according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein said extracting feature information from the background image includes:

selecting a target background image from a plurality of background images and extracting the characteristic information from the target background image; wherein the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

6. The wall surface background setting method according to any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein before extracting the feature information from the background image, the method comprises:

preprocessing the acquired background image; wherein the preprocessing comprises at least one of filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

7. A wall background setting system is characterized by comprising a selecting module, an obtaining module, an extracting module and a mapping module;

the selecting module is used for selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model;

the acquisition module is used for acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

the extraction module is used for extracting characteristic information from the background image;

the mapping module is used for mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface.

8. The wall surface background setting system according to claim 7, wherein the obtaining module is further configured to directly obtain the background image by shooting with the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored.

9. The wall surface background setting system according to claim 7, wherein the characteristic information includes color information and/or all or part of image information in the background image.

10. The wall surface background setting system according to claim 9, wherein when the characteristic information includes the whole or part of the image information, the mapping module maps the whole or part of the image information to the target wall surface in proportion.

11. The wall surface background setting system according to any one of claims 7 to 10, wherein said extraction module is further configured to select a target background image from a plurality of said background images and extract said feature information from said target background image; wherein the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

12. The wall surface background setting system according to any one of claims 7 to 10, wherein the wall surface background setting system further comprises a preprocessing module;

the preprocessing module is used for preprocessing the acquired background image; the preprocessing comprises filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

13. An electronic device comprising a memory, a processor, and a computer program stored on the memory and executable on the processor, wherein the processor implements the wall background setting method according to any one of claims 1 to 6 when executing the computer program.

14. A computer storage medium on which a computer program is stored, the program realizing the wall surface background setting method according to any one of claims 1 to 6 when executed by a processor.

Technical Field

The present invention relates to the field of information display technologies, and in particular, to a method and a system for setting a wall background, an electronic device, and a medium.

Background

The requirements of people on indoor decoration are more and more strict, in decoration design, a decoration style of a whole house is often determined in advance, for most people, setting of the decoration style and even selection of wall background colors can take a lot of time, but due to the fact that no reference object is provided, the effect expected to be presented by a user on characteristic information such as the decoration style, the wall background colors or ornaments selected in a lot of time cannot be expected or even is unsatisfactory.

In the prior art, a user often selects a wall color or an ornament from a feature information base loaded in advance, and then drags the selected wall color or the ornament to a three-dimensional space for display; however, since the user can only select the feature information from the feature information library with limited colors and styles, the decoration or color of the mood instrument seen by the user visiting a furniture exhibition or visiting a family of other people cannot be directly displayed in a three-dimensional space.

Disclosure of Invention

The invention aims to solve the technical problem that feature information independently selected by a user cannot be displayed in advance in the prior art, and provides a wall surface background setting method, a wall surface background setting system, electronic equipment and a medium.

The invention solves the technical problems through the following technical scheme:

the invention provides a wall surface background setting method, which comprises the following steps:

selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model;

acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

extracting feature information from the background image;

and mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface.

Preferably, the acquiring the background image by the shooting device includes:

directly acquiring the background image through shooting of the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored.

Preferably, the feature information includes color information and/or all or part of image information in the background image.

Preferably, when the feature information includes the whole or part of the image information, the whole or part of the image information is proportionally mapped to the target wall surface.

Preferably, the extracting feature information from the background image includes:

selecting a target background image from a plurality of background images and extracting the characteristic information from the target background image; wherein the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

Preferably, before extracting the feature information from the background image, the method includes:

preprocessing the acquired background image; wherein the preprocessing comprises at least one of filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

The invention also provides a wall surface background setting system, which comprises a selection module, an acquisition module, an extraction module and a mapping module;

the selecting module is used for selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model;

the acquisition module is used for acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

the extraction module is used for extracting characteristic information from the background image;

the mapping module is used for mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface.

Preferably, the obtaining module is further configured to directly obtain the background image through shooting by the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored.

Preferably, the feature information includes color information and/or all or part of image information in the background image.

Preferably, when the feature information includes the whole or part of the image information, the mapping module maps the whole or part of the image information to the target wall surface in proportion.

Preferably, the extracting module is further configured to select a target background image from the plurality of background images and extract the feature information from the target background image; wherein the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

Preferably, the wall surface background setting system further comprises a preprocessing module;

the preprocessing module is used for preprocessing the acquired background image; wherein the preprocessing comprises at least one of filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

The invention also provides an electronic device, which comprises a memory, a processor and a computer program which is stored on the memory and can run on the processor, wherein the processor realizes the wall background setting method when executing the computer program.

The present invention also provides a computer storage medium having stored thereon a computer program which, when executed by a processor, implements the wall surface background setting method as described above.

The positive progress effects of the invention are as follows: the characteristic information which is selected by the user in advance is mapped to the wall surface, the user can see the real object effect in advance on the basis that the wall surface is not required to be coated with paint again, reworking and time waste caused by unsatisfactory effect after the characteristic information such as wall surface color and wall surface decoration is applied to the wall are avoided, the cost of user decoration is greatly reduced, and meanwhile damage to the wall body caused by repeated construction is also avoided.

Drawings

Fig. 1 is a flowchart of a wall surface background setting method according to embodiment 1 of the present invention.

Fig. 2 is a flowchart of a wall surface background setting method according to embodiment 2 of the present invention.

Fig. 3 is a schematic structural view of a wall surface background setting system according to embodiment 3 of the present invention.

Fig. 4 is a schematic structural view of a wall surface background setting system according to embodiment 4 of the present invention.

Fig. 5 is a schematic diagram of a hardware structure of an electronic device according to embodiment 5 of the present invention.

Detailed Description

The invention is further illustrated by the following examples, which are not intended to limit the scope of the invention.

The wall surface background setting method provided by the embodiment of the invention can be applied to scenes that a user selects different decoration styles to correspond to different decoration background wall surfaces, different functions to correspond to different decoration background wall surfaces, different spatial layouts to correspond to different decoration background wall surfaces and the like.

Example 1

The present embodiment provides a method for setting a wall surface background, and fig. 1 is a flowchart of the method for setting a wall surface background according to embodiment 1. The method for setting the surface background of the embodiment comprises the following steps:

and S101, selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model.

In this step, the three-dimensional house model is a three-dimensional model of a house where a wall surface to be set as a wall surface background is located, and the three-dimensional house model can be constructed by acquiring relevant data including but not limited to panoramic images, point cloud data, depth of field data and the like of the house in advance and utilizing the relevant data of the house, so that the three-dimensional house model can display structures in the house in an all-around manner, and a user can conveniently select a target wall surface.

In a specific example, a three-dimensional model can be constructed by collecting panoramic images, point cloud data and depth of field data of each room in a house, and finally the three-dimensional model of each room is fused and spliced to obtain a three-dimensional house model of the whole house, for example, relevant data of rooms such as a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen can be collected, then a three-dimensional model of the corresponding room is constructed, three-dimensional models of all the rooms in the house are fused and spliced to obtain a three-dimensional house model of the whole house, and then a target wall surface is selected from the three-dimensional house model so as to be set for the target wall surface in the subsequent process.

S102, acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

and S103, extracting characteristic information from the background image.

In this step, the feature information includes, but is not limited to, color information in the background image and/or all or part of the image information;

the color information is a ratio of three primary colors of color, namely an RGB value, and the color information can be a plurality of colors on the surface of the same target object in the background image and acquire corresponding color values; or the colors of a plurality of target objects of the background image, and color values corresponding to a plurality of colors are obtained; the whole image information can be the whole content in the background image, such as the whole decorative pattern in one photo; the partial image information may be a partial content of a background image, such as a certain item in a photograph, including but not limited to ornaments, decorative pictures, and the like.

And S104, mapping the characteristic information to a target wall surface.

In a specific embodiment, if a user needs to reset the color of a white background wall surface in a bedroom, a three-dimensional model of the bedroom can be built through step S101, a target wall surface to be set is selected, the characteristic information of the cardiograph is shot in the form of an image through step S102, for example, a color picture of the sky, a color to be set, for example, the color sky blue of the sky, is obtained from the image through step S103, and then the sky blue is mapped to the target wall surface through step S104, so that the user can view an indoor simple installation environment anytime and anywhere, and the problem that in a decoration process, the effect expected to be presented by the user for characteristic information, such as a decoration style, a wall surface color or a background color, and the like, which are selected by spending a large amount of time, cannot be expected or even is unsatisfactory is solved.

This embodiment is on the basis that need not apply paint the wall again, through selecting the target wall in three-dimensional model, and then will predetermine characteristic information such as wall colour and map to the corresponding wall in the three-dimensional model, can let the user see the effect in advance, avoid because of the unsatisfactory reworking that leads to of effect, waste time of going to the wall because of characteristic information such as wall colour, wall ornament, the cost of user's fitment has significantly reduced, still avoided the damage that causes the wall body because of repeated construction simultaneously.

Example 2

As shown in fig. 2, the wall surface background setting method of the present embodiment is a further improvement of embodiment 1, and specifically:

step S102 includes:

s1021, directly acquiring a background image through shooting of the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which images photographed by the photographing devices are stored.

In specific implementation, the image can be directly shot through the shooting device, the shooting device includes but is not limited to at least one of a mobile terminal, a camera and a video recorder, or the background image is obtained from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored, such as an album, so that a user can record the psychographic feature information which is suddenly encountered or found in life as the background image anytime, anywhere and autonomously, and the user experience is improved.

Step S103 further includes:

s1022, preprocessing the acquired background image; the preprocessing includes but is not limited to a processing method capable of improving image quality to facilitate extracting characteristic information, wherein the processing method includes at least one of filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

Specifically, the background image is subjected to filtering, denoising, enhancing, binarization, segmentation and other processing, so that the visual effect of the image can be improved, the most significant part of the local intensity change of the image, namely the contour of the feature information, is highlighted, and then the feature information in the background image is extracted by using an edge contour extraction method, so that the original features of the feature information can be reserved, the extracted feature information is prevented from being inconsistent with original data, and therefore a user can see the truest feature information.

Step S103 includes:

s1031, selecting a target background image from the background images and extracting characteristic information from the target background image; wherein, the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

In a specific example, due to different shooting angles or different shooting devices, a plurality of background images with the same main content but different main content sizes are generated, for example, in 3 background images with the same decoration vase but different shooting angles of the 3 background images, in order to enable the extracted feature information to be quickly and conveniently mapped in the three-dimensional house model, a background image with the aspect ratio of the target background image closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface needs to be selected from the extracted feature information.

Step S104 includes the steps of:

and S1041, when the characteristic information comprises all or partial image information, mapping all or partial image information to the target wall surface in proportion.

Specifically, when the characteristic information is all image information, such as all decorative patterns in one photo, the characteristic information required by the user is the decorative patterns in the photo, at this time, the decorative patterns are all image information, the size of the decorative patterns is far smaller than that of the background wall surface, and in order to enable the proportion of the decorative patterns to be close to or the same as that of the background wall surface, the decorative patterns need to be magnified and mapped to the wall surface in proportion; or when the characteristic information is partial image information, such as a decorative picture in a picture, the characteristic information required by the user is the decorative picture in the picture, the decorative picture is the partial image information, the size of the decorative picture is far larger than that of the background wall surface, and in order to enable the proportion of the decorative picture to be close to or the same as that of the background wall surface, the decorative picture needs to be scaled down and mapped to the wall surface; by flexibly mapping the characteristic information in the background image to the wall surface in proportion, the abrupt feeling caused by the incongruity of the proportion of the characteristic information is avoided.

This embodiment is through mapping the characteristic information who independently chooses the user in advance to the wall on, on the basis that need not apply paint the wall again, can let the user see the effect in kind in advance, avoids leading to doing over again, waste time because of the effect is unsatisfactory after going to the wall because of characteristic information such as wall colour, wall ornament, the cost of the user fitment that has significantly reduced has still avoided the damage that causes the wall body because of repeated construction simultaneously.

Example 3

The present embodiment provides a wall background setting system, and fig. 3 is a schematic structural diagram of the wall background setting system of the embodiment 3. The wall surface background setting system of the embodiment comprises a selection module 1, an acquisition module 2, an extraction module 3 and a mapping module 4;

and the selection module 1 is used for selecting a target wall surface from the three-dimensional house model.

The three-dimensional house model is a three-dimensional model of a house where a wall surface to be set with a wall surface background is located, and can be constructed by acquiring related data including but not limited to panoramic images, point cloud data, depth of field data and the like of the house in advance and utilizing the related data of the house, so that the three-dimensional house model can display structures in the house in an all-around manner, and a user can conveniently select a target wall surface.

In a specific example, a three-dimensional model can be constructed by collecting panoramic images, point cloud data and depth of field data of each room in a house, and finally the three-dimensional model of each room is fused and spliced to obtain a three-dimensional house model of the whole house, for example, relevant data of rooms such as a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen can be collected, then a three-dimensional model of the corresponding room is constructed, three-dimensional models of all the rooms in the house are fused and spliced to obtain a three-dimensional house model of the whole house, and then a target wall surface is selected from the three-dimensional house model so as to be set for the target wall surface in the subsequent process.

The acquisition module 2 is used for acquiring a background image through a shooting device;

and the extraction module 3 extracts the characteristic information from the background image.

Specifically, the feature information includes, but is not limited to, color information in the background image and/or all or part of the image information;

the color information is a ratio of three primary colors of color, namely an RGB value, and the color information can be a plurality of colors on the surface of the same target object in the background image and acquire corresponding color values; or the colors of a plurality of target objects of the background image, and color values corresponding to a plurality of colors are obtained; the whole image information can be the whole content in the background image, such as the whole decorative pattern in one photo; the partial image information may be a partial content of a background image, such as a certain item in a photograph, including but not limited to ornaments, decorative pictures, and the like.

And the mapping module 4 is used for mapping the characteristic information to the target wall surface.

In a specific embodiment, if a user needs to reset the color of a white background wall surface in a bedroom, a target wall surface to be set can be selected by constructing a three-dimensional model of the bedroom and the selection module 1, the characteristic information of the cardioscope is shot in the form of an image by the acquisition module 2, for example, a color picture of the sky, the color to be set, for example, the sky color sky blue, is acquired from the image by the extraction module 3, and the sky blue is mapped to the target wall surface by the mapping module 4; the method and the device enable a user to check the indoor simple-mounted environment anytime and anywhere, and solve the problem that the expected display effect of the user on characteristic information such as decoration style, wall background color or ornaments selected by spending a large amount of time in the decoration process cannot be expected or even is unsatisfactory.

This embodiment is on the basis that need not apply paint the wall again, through selecting the target wall in three-dimensional model, and then will predetermine characteristic information such as wall colour and map to the corresponding wall in the three-dimensional model, can let the user see the effect in advance, avoid because of the unsatisfactory reworking that leads to of effect, waste time of going to the wall because of characteristic information such as wall colour, wall ornament, the cost of user's fitment has significantly reduced, still avoided the damage that causes the wall body because of repeated construction simultaneously.

Example 4

As shown in fig. 4, the wall surface background setting system of the present embodiment is a further improvement of embodiment 3, specifically:

the acquisition module 2 directly acquires a background image through shooting of the shooting device; or, the background image is acquired from a preset image database in which images photographed by the photographing devices are stored.

In specific implementation, the image can be directly shot through the shooting device, the shooting device includes but is not limited to at least one of a mobile terminal, a camera and a video recorder, or the background image is obtained from a preset image database in which the image shot by the shooting device is stored, such as an album, so that a user can record the psychographic feature information which is suddenly encountered or found in life as the background image anytime, anywhere and autonomously, and the user experience is improved.

In an optional implementation manner, the wall surface background setting system further includes a preprocessing module 5, where the preprocessing module 5 is configured to preprocess the acquired background image; the preprocessing includes but is not limited to a processing method capable of improving image quality to facilitate extracting characteristic information, wherein the processing method includes at least one of filtering denoising, enhancing, binarization and segmentation.

Specifically, the background image is subjected to filtering, denoising, enhancing, binarization, segmentation and other processing, so that the visual effect of the image can be improved, the most significant part of the local intensity change of the image, namely the contour of the feature information, is highlighted, and then the feature information in the background image is extracted by using an edge contour extraction method, so that the original features of the feature information can be reserved, the extracted feature information is prevented from being inconsistent with original data, and therefore a user can see the truest feature information.

The extraction module 3 is further configured to select a target background image from the plurality of background images and extract feature information from the target background image; wherein, the aspect ratio of the target background image is closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface.

In a specific example, due to different shooting angles or different shooting devices, a plurality of background images with the same main content but different main content sizes are generated, for example, in 3 background images with the same decoration vase but different shooting angles of the 3 background images, in order to enable the extracted feature information to be quickly and conveniently mapped in the three-dimensional house model, a background image with the aspect ratio of the target background image closest to the aspect ratio of the target wall surface needs to be selected from the extracted feature information.

In an optional embodiment, the mapping module 4 is further configured to map all or part of the image information to the target wall surface in proportion by the mapping module 4 when the feature information in the system includes all or part of the image information.

Specifically, when the characteristic information is all image information, such as all decorative patterns in one photo, the characteristic information required by the user is the decorative patterns in the photo, at this time, the decorative patterns are all image information, the size of the decorative patterns is far smaller than that of the background wall surface, and in order to enable the proportion of the decorative patterns to be close to or the same as that of the background wall surface, the decorative patterns need to be magnified and mapped to the wall surface in proportion; or when the characteristic information is partial image information, such as a decorative picture in a picture, the characteristic information required by the user is the decorative picture in the picture, the decorative picture is the partial image information, the size of the decorative picture is far larger than that of the background wall surface, and in order to enable the proportion of the decorative picture to be close to or the same as that of the background wall surface, the decorative picture needs to be scaled down and mapped to the wall surface; by flexibly mapping the characteristic information in the background image to the wall surface in proportion, the abrupt feeling caused by the incongruity of the proportion of the characteristic information is avoided.

This embodiment is through mapping the characteristic information who independently chooses the user in advance to the wall on, on the basis that need not apply paint the wall again, can let the user see the effect in kind in advance, avoids leading to doing over again, waste time because of the effect is unsatisfactory after going to the wall because of characteristic information such as wall colour, wall ornament, the cost of the user fitment that has significantly reduced has still avoided the damage that causes the wall body because of repeated construction simultaneously.

Example 5

Fig. 5 is a schematic structural diagram of an electronic device according to embodiment 5 of the present invention. The electronic device comprises a memory, a processor and a computer program which is stored on the memory and can run on the processor, wherein the processor executes the program to realize the wall background setting method of the embodiment 1 or 2. The electronic device 30 shown in fig. 5 is only an example, and should not bring any limitation to the functions and the scope of use of the embodiment of the present invention.

As shown in fig. 5, the electronic device 30 may be embodied in the form of a general purpose computing device, which may be, for example, a server device. The components of the electronic device 30 may include, but are not limited to: the at least one processor 31, the at least one memory 32, and a bus 33 connecting the various system components (including the memory 32 and the processor 31).

The bus 33 includes a data bus, an address bus, and a control bus.

The memory 32 may include volatile memory, such as Random Access Memory (RAM)321 and/or cache memory 322, and may further include Read Only Memory (ROM) 323.

Memory 32 may also include a program/utility 325 having a set (at least one) of program modules 324, such program modules 324 including, but not limited to: an operating system, one or more application programs, other program modules, and program data, each of which, or some combination thereof, may comprise an implementation of a network environment.

The processor 31 executes various functional applications and data processing, such as the wall surface background setting method of embodiment 1 or 2 of the present invention, by running the computer program stored in the memory 32.

The electronic device 30 may also communicate with one or more external devices 34 (e.g., keyboard, pointing device, etc.). Such communication may be through input/output (I/O) interfaces 35. Also, model-generating device 30 may also communicate with one or more networks (e.g., a Local Area Network (LAN), a Wide Area Network (WAN), and/or a public network, such as the Internet) via network adapter 36. As shown, network adapter 36 communicates with the other modules of model-generating device 30 via bus 33. It should be understood that although not shown in the figures, other hardware and/or software modules may be used in conjunction with the model-generating device 30, including but not limited to: microcode, device drivers, redundant processors, external disk drive arrays, RAID (disk array) systems, tape drives, and data backup storage systems, etc.

It should be noted that although in the above detailed description several units/modules or sub-units/modules of the electronic device are mentioned, such a division is merely exemplary and not mandatory. Indeed, the features and functionality of two or more of the units/modules described above may be embodied in one unit/module according to embodiments of the invention. Conversely, the features and functions of one unit/module described above may be further divided into embodiments by a plurality of units/modules.

Example 6

The present embodiment provides a computer-readable storage medium on which a computer program is stored, the program realizing the steps of the wall surface background setting method of embodiment 1 or 2 when executed by a processor.

More specific examples, among others, that the readable storage medium may employ may include, but are not limited to: a portable disk, a hard disk, random access memory, read only memory, erasable programmable read only memory, optical storage device, magnetic storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing.

In a possible embodiment, the present invention can also be implemented in the form of a program product including program code for causing a terminal device to execute the steps of implementing the wall background setting method of embodiment 1 or 2 when the program product is run on the terminal device.

Where program code for carrying out the invention is written in any combination of one or more programming languages, the program code may be executed entirely on the user device, partly on the user device, as a stand-alone software package, partly on the user device and partly on a remote device or entirely on the remote device.

While specific embodiments of the invention have been described above, it will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that this is by way of example only, and that the scope of the invention is defined by the appended claims. Various changes and modifications to these embodiments may be made by those skilled in the art without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention, and these changes and modifications are within the scope of the invention.